On the road with Sandra – Teenage Hitchhikers, her final film role

Note she's credited under her own name in this movie

Sandra Peabody's screen acting career lasted only a decade, from her debut in Misfit in 1965 through The Last House on the Left to... this. Teenage Hitchhikers was her farewell to this branch of the arts, being filmed in September 1973 and hitting drive-ins the following year with a general release in 1975. In 1977 a significantly cut version was classified X in the UK. I said in an earlier post that I'd never seen this title, but I've rectified that now. The movie is relatively easy to get hold of, as it was released on region-free Blu-ray by Dark Force Entertainment in 2020.

Despite its almost clichéd exploitation movie title this is a more interesting film than might be supposed, and not just because it features Margaret Whitton in a supporting role. The setup is pretty simple: Mouse (Kathie Christopher) and Bird (Peabody) are two young women hitching across America and paying for their rides with... well, it's sexploitation. You guess. So far, so 1970s. What's unusual here is the fact that the ladies are – mostly – in control of all this. It's kind of a road movie/sexploitation/comedy mash-up, and sometimes as awkward as that sounds.

Considering the microscopic $15,000 budget and one-week production time, the film is surprisingly well put together; it doesn't look like a student movie. Pacing is uneven, admittedly: an orgy scene late on in the story – clearly there as a draw to the drive-in crowd – drags on for more than a tenth of the film's eighty-minute runtime and eventually becomes tedious even if you're into that kind of thing. A couple of the comedic set pieces are more in the mould of a rather overlong Benny Hill Show sketch than anything, too. Still moderately funny if you're in the mood, though.

Using rape as a source of humour wasn't a hard no back then – Blazing Saddles also came out in 1974 – but it does firmly place movies that do it as "of their time". That said, at least this time Mouse and Bird have one over the somewhat bumbling rapist (Ric Mancini) who our heroines have to save Jenny (Nikki Lynn) from and who appears in a couple of scenes. A sequence involving a nude Peabody, playing an inmate of the "State Farm for Wayward Girls", calmly criticising his "technique" while eating an enormous, not-at-all-symbolic red apple, is memorable if nothing else. (By this point Jenny has been rescued; the rapist is alone.)

The supplementary material for the Teenage Hitchhikers Blu-ray includes an interview with the director, Gerri Sedley (a pseudonym for Jerome S. Kaufmann). Notably, he praises Sandra for being the "smartest" of the cast, and we discover that they kept in touch via mail after the film wrapped. Both he and cinematographer Bill La Mond, who provides a commentary track, note that weather conditions did not help the production. The opening scene was filmed in driving rain, and temperatures were not always on their side either. The crew numbered around six, tiny even by the standards of similar movies.

Sandra also shows a side to her acting in this film that many of its (and her) fans might have enjoyed seeing more of had she remained in movies. She has good chemistry with Christopher, and her comic timing is a good match for Christopher's own. Unsurprisingly for this kind of movie, her clothes aren't always on, but as long as the quips keep flowing you can believe reasonably well that these two young women are making the choices in their lives – and, later on, allowing Jenny to join their little gang as well.

Teenage Hitchhikers isn't quite the lost classic some reviews make it out to be. It is, however, something a little bit different from the average mid-70s flick in this genre that its female leads are – by 1974 sexploitation standards, so calibrate your expectations – generally more empowered. Indeed, the film is generally more successful when it's sending up exploitation conventions and less appealing when it's simply following them.

One final thought. End credits aside, the very last time we see ever Sandra on a movie screen, she's with Mouse and Jenny in their dubiously acquired car, grinning hugely and flipping off the camera as they drive away. I can't help but cheer.